If you've never spent a lot of time in the Seattle area, you may think that it rains here all of the time. Seattle is a rather rainy place. But we do get our share of dry spells, particularly in summer. From around the middle of June through mid-September, most years find us high and dry for weeks on end. In fact, some towns in my area suggest that folks plant drought resistant landscapes, here, where it rains and rains and rains.
We do our part and avoid watering the lawns in summer. We also keep a large swath of our property in woods. If a plant or tree can't take a dry summer, it just doesn't make it in the woods. But our gardens and orchards do need constant watering in summer.
I begin each summer with two full rain barrels, with a combined capacity of 110 gallons. These rain barrels catch the spring rain from our roof during storms. They are full and overflowing when I am beginning to set plants out into my garden each year. Most years, we get enough refill rain to keep those barrels topped off until about the 3rd week of June. At that point, what I have in the barrels is about all I'll have for the rest of summer. Any summer rainfall we get seems to get sucked up by the bone dry cedar shingles, with only a small trickle left to run off and into the gutters before dripping into the barrels.
Knowing that this rain water is limited for our active growing season, I water very judiciously. Even so, by early July, my rain barrels are about empty. For the hottest months of the year, I have to rely on municipal water to keep my gardens growing.
You would think living in a place with a reputation for lots of rainfall that we'd have low water bills. I wish that were so. It's not only the water and delivery that accounts for our high water bills. The bulk of the cost, I believe, is for the wastewater treatment for all of that water that goes down the drains, which is calculated for each household based on the amount of water used. So, I try super hard in summer to use as little extra water outdoors as possible.
This year, as I was using up the rain barrel water, I began thinking that we should save the "cleaner" used kitchen water and pour it into the emptying rain barrel. In years past, I've set the watering can on the deck just outside the kitchen door. It was a bit of a hassle pouring the used water into the small opening of the watering can, leaving a lot on the deck floor and having a limited capacity (2.5 gallon can) to hold water for the next watering. It was once in spring that I began thinking how nice it would be to have a spare rain barrel that I could put on the deck next to the kitchen, so I could pour the used kitchen water directly into that nearby rain barrel and save it until needed. Rain barrels are pricey, however. Then I thought, what if I had a larger container for collecting used water on the deck, then transferred that water into the rain barrel a few gallons at a time. I remembered the stack of 5-gallon buckets in the garage and grabbed one and put it on the deck just outside the kitchen door. I also pulled a plastic dishpan out of the pantry and placed it in the kitchen sink. We now rinse (whether that be hands, vegetables, or pots/pans) over this plastic tub and transfer that saved water to the 5-gallon bucket as it fills. Then once the 5-gallon bucket is about 3/4 full, I take that down the steps to the rain barrel next to the garden. The rain barrel has a screen on top, filtering out any vegetable debris that remains in the rinse water. I find I'm emptying the 5-gallon bucket into the rain barrel 2 to 4 times per day.
Anyway, my post today is about more than just saving water. It's about what I find I need to do to make new habits stick. I was thinking about making new habits and why we sometimes can't keep them. Every summer I've tried to save some of the used kitchen water for watering our vegetables. One or more of the steps in making a new habit are sometimes inconvenient or difficult to perform. I mentioned some of the problems I had with saving water in a watering can on the deck. It had a small opening on the top, meaning I spilled a lot of the water I was trying to save. The watering can didn't hold enough water to make much of a dent in our water usage, just a mere 2.5 gallons. If I had the time to drop everything and go water a portion of the garden with the watering can every time it filled up, perhaps capacity wouldn't have been such an obstacle. But for me, it really was. I wanted to have larger amounts of water on hand for my daily watering chore. The 5-gallon bucket on the deck was just the thing I needed to make saving the water both more convenient and help me better achieve my water-saving goals.
I've been amazed by how much rinse water we actually save each day. We are reclaiming between 10 and 15 gallons of mostly clean water each day. (I rinse my hands a lot when cooking and baking. In addition, garden produce is much dirtier than purchased produce.) We're careful to only pour mostly clean water into the barrel, as we don't want bad odors or bacteria to develop. Some of the water that is not saved and stored in the rain barrels is still clean enough to dump on shrubs and trees by carrying the washpan directly out to a tree. So in fact, we're saving more than 10 gallons of water per day.
So far this seems to be working for me. I eliminated some of the aspects that put me off from sticking with this new habit. Such a little change -- using one of our larger buckets to collect the water before dumping into the emptying rain barrel. Time will tell if I stick with this water saving this year.
Have you encountered challenges when forming new habits? How did you overcome those challenges? What ways did you need to rethink your new process?
